MatBennett.com

As anyone who has ever seen me in profile will testify, I am not the kind of guy who shies away from a bit of chocolate, but this week I’ve had plenty thanks!

We’ve being doing some of the close-up photography for a new site that we are working on, ChocoholicShop. The photos are coming out great, but the number of Belgium chocolates we are being left with is just too much! Yes, I suppose we could bin the left-overs, but it just doesn’t seem right.

We haven’t got a finalised date for when the site goes live yet, but I can heartily recommend the plain chocolate covered candied orange peel. ;¬)

I seem to be getting into a bit of a rut with my picture taking and ending up with hundreds of pictures of Groynes on Hayling beach. Their convenient and always make a good picture, but I thought I’d have a little look around for ideas for mini photo projects / challenges to make me experiment a bit more.

Searching around for ideas I found PhotoFriday.com. This site sets a new challenge every week and gets people to send in pictures meeting the criteria they set. Although almost all of the photographers are leaps and bounds ahead of me I think I might give it a whirl.

http://www.photofriday.com

Accidentally stumbled across this site the other day. Weird but brilliant! Now if I can just get the “My Chicken’s gone to heaven” song out of my head…

http://www.mailorderchickens.com

OK, I know that this is old hat, but the entry about the Matt Cutts Blog made me think of it again, and I thought it worth noting here.

Google-guy Says is simply a site that notes when a particular user posts on the Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums. Not all that interesting unless you bare in mind that Google-guy, as the name suggests works at Google.

I’m not a huge fan of either forum as the signal to noise ratio is generally way off, but there is good information on both if you care to dig. Some of the best of it comes from Google-guy, which obviously makes Google-guy says a useful tool.

There now appears to be at least 2 sites running under the same name, both of which appear useful. I’ve therefore linked to both below:

http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/
http://googleguy.zorgloob.com/

If you know me then you’re probably wondering how I came to end up running a website about caravans, as it’s not something that I have a particular interest in.

The c4caravans.com was started a few years back as a demonstration of a free advertising system for a customer interested in running such a site for a another market. By the time the project unfortunately got shelved I had developed a fair bit of code and it seemed a shame to just scrap it, so decided to put it up in some form. As it didn’t seem right to use the same market as the customer had intended I picked another at random and decided on Caravans.

Since those beginnings the site has steadily grown in popularity into a busy caravan sales portal. So much so, that I decided to re-write the entire site earlier this year to incorporate and ever growing list of improvements that I had in mind.

Today the site still operates as a free caravan sales portal and continues to occupy when I am off work. Popularity has continued to grow and small improvements continue to be made and the site seems to be going from strength to strength. So much so, in fact, that things are coming full circle and we are now looking at starting another site, along similar lines, as a commercial work project.